serve the manner in which his new officers performed
their duties; but after that he announced his intention to sleep in all
night, laughingly declaring that as he was now employing two mates he
saw no reason why he should not leave them to do the work and take his
ease like a gentleman. He was good enough to express his complete
satisfaction with my abilities as a navigator, and opened his eyes in
astonishment when he saw that I was not content with a mere daily
observation of the meridian altitude of the sun, but used as well such
comparatively intricate problems as those of the double altitudes,
lunars, altitudes of the stars, and Great Circle sailing. But what
gratified him most of all, I think, was the fact that before we had been
aboard two days I had got Simpson, the sailmaker, at work upon an
enormous jack-yard gaff-topsail for use in light winds, the only
gaff-topsail that the schooner had hitherto possessed being a trumpery
little jib-headed affair which she could carry in quite a strong breeze.
I also caused a set of preventer backstays to be fitted, which enabled
us to carry an amount of canvas in a breeze that would otherwise have
been impossible.

We certainly did carry on in a manner that sometimes made the old man
gasp with astonishment, for hitherto he had been in the habit of sailing
his schooner in a very jog-trot fashion; but now we handled her as we
would have done a racer, and it was surprising to see how, day after
day, her mileage increased, and how rapidly her track on the chart
stretched southward. The skipper, in his groping, cautious way, had
fully intended to make sure of his position by heading for and sighting
the Falklands before attempting to make the Straits, but I told him I
regarded that as an utterly useless waste of time, and worked out a
Great Circle track direct for Cape Virgins, at the entrance to the
Straits, to his mingled consternation and delight. "If you don't cast
the schooner away between you," he said, "I guess we'll get to that
there oyster bank early enough to clean it out before the _Kingfisher_
arrives; for, smart seaman as Slocum thinks hisself, I reckon he ain't a
patch on you for carryin' on."

For the first three or four days after our arrival on board the _Martha
Brown_, Cunningham devoted his energies entirely to the task of
qualifying himself to take charge of a watch, looking after the ship,
and generally polishing up his somewhat rusty seamanship; but he